Why do the regions and counties maps of Portugal look like "perforated"

Question

I recognized that the maps for counties and regions of Portugal look different: the areas are not filled completely, they have "holes" and therefore the image looks ugly.

You can see it for example at http://project-gc.com/ProfileStats/FerrariGirlNr1#Maps if you scroll down to the "Portugal" section. I haven't seen it at other maps, so it seems to be a source file problem of the map?

Comments

UPDATE: New data has been imported and this should be solved within 2 weeks (waiting for cached data to expire).

Answer 1

Sorry about the late answer. We have been meaning to try to fix this before answering, but then it just hasn't happened yet.

The reason is that we did not have any good source material. We did not have any region polygons, only county. So to create the region polygons we merged the counties into groups, which doesn't look good at all.

When we did this, there was no data in Openstreetmap which is our usual source for this. Nowadays there is, and it's on our todo-list for polygons to test an import for Portugal. We are hoping to get around to it soon, it's probably the second highest priority of polygons.

France is the one with higher priority, which we promised last week. But due to technical issues with Openstreetmap we had to abort/postpone.

UPDATE: New data has been imported and this should be solved within 2 weeks (waiting for cached data to expire).

Answer 2

I would think this is a filling artefact though is really looks a bit strange. You can see a similar (but less affecting) effect on the Malta lap when some of the water at the coast seems to be missing. Typically these things happen when lines have the wrong orientation, or neighbouring areas use different resolution (as on the Malta map).